The day the whole world changed

Adair Lara

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, September 12, 2001

I SAT IN my robe at the kitchen table, watching CNN, seeing the World Trade Center silently explode, time after time. I felt as if I couldn't catch my breath. In another tape loop the same man flapped his hands as he ran, the same woman ran at his side, her backpack bobbing up and down. A police officer had torn off a piece of his T-shirt to pull it over his mouth. From upstairs Jim's new boarder Tom came down wearing only pants to watch TV with us. I silently gave him a cup of coffee.

"I just needed to be with someone for a few minutes," he said. He lived in Manhattan for 10 years and knows people there.

We could see the ash covering the streets, papers from offices, files, calendars, photos of children, children who had been kissed and dropped off at school perhaps only a half hour before the photo was blown to smithereens, along with the computer it was on, the room it was in and the building.

On this coast, 3,000 miles from that rubble and smoke, we watched, stunned, and did what we always do -- called everybody we cared about.

IT MAKES NO difference if no one we knew could possibly have been hurt in New York: the sense of danger permeated every house, every neighborhood in the country. We were all hurt, in one way or the other.

Morgan called, and the sound of her voice filled the places the TV had emptied. She'd been watching it on her local TV news, which has the banner Good Day, Sacramento! under it. I told her not to go to work. Bill had put on his tie and tried to go to his office, but was turned back by a policeman who said they were closing everything within five blocks of the Financial District.

Bill came back and changed into jeans, in silence.

Patrick called from L.A. "This is the crime of the century," he said angrily. He said his roommate had watched for a while, then announced that he was going back to sleep. "I couldn't believe that," Patrick said. "I'm ready to join the Army." I had an image of that, my tall son in Army fatigues, rifle,

jogging across a field where bursts of fire came -- from what enemy? His grandfather was a 20-year-old at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese struck. Is this what that felt like?

When we finally left the house, the vivid red stripes of our flag waved from houses in our pastel liberal neighborhood like strange fruit.

Our friend Monique called. She couldn't stop crying, thinking of all the children in New York whose mothers and fathers would not come home. Her 16- month-old Julian babbled in the background. They were flying to a wedding in New York tomorrow, but they won't be now, because no one is flying to New York tomorrow.

I WRITE THIS under an empty sky: There is not a single commercial airplane in the air. The terrorists have emptied our schools and offices, closed our financial markets, and sent America, dazed, into the streets. And we in San Francisco don't know yet what friends of ours were in the jet that was bound for San Francisco, diverted from God knows what target, and crashed near Pittsburgh after God knows what act of heroism that kept it from reaching its target.

But the agonizing losses belong to New York. My sister Adrian called to say she has a friend there, Jennifer Williams, an administrator at a psychiatric facility in Manhattan. Jennifer was on a train from Newark, crossing the Meadowlands area around 8:45 a.m., staring out the window toward the Trade Center, when she saw a black thing moving toward the tower with the giant aerial on top. Then a black cloud and flames erupted from the side of the building. She emerged from Penn Station to find pandemonium everywhere and groups of people shaking and crying as they stared at the flaming tower. She was dusty and ashy by the time she reached Park Avenue.

"Not long after I arrived at work, we found a TV and, to our horror, watched as the towers collapsed, one by one. Some of my friends called and told me they were all right." She had not heard from her brother Gary, who works for Marsh McLennan on the 100th floor of the north tower. "I know my brother. If he had a breath of life in him, he would've found a way to contact us. His wife hasn't heard a word. None of us have. All we can do is sit and wait. And pray.

"We all knew this could happen some day: Why weren't we prepared?"

My sister Mickey called. "I heard you were on a plane," she said. "I wanted to make sure you were all right."

Planes have become dangerous in America. "It's one of those days when you feel the whole world has changed," said Bill as we walked around the streets. "We've lost our confidence. Anybody can find himself or herself on a hijacked plane, about to be used as a weapon."